GOP - Grand Obama Party

"Protectionist"? "Isolationist"? Even "Nativist"?

Well, from 1860 to 1913, the United States was the most protectionist nation on earth and produced the most awesome growth of any nation in history. In 1860, the American economy was half of Britain’s; in 1913, more than twice Britain’s.

In 1920, Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge won a landslide, cut income taxes from Wilson’s 69 per cent to 25 per cent and doubled tariffs. America went on a tear. When Coolidge went home in 1929, the United States was producing 42 per cent of the world’s manufactured goods.

It all goes back to the start. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison moved the Tariff Act of 1789 through Congress. Aided by Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, President Madison enacted the Tariff of 1816 to protect infant American industries from British dumping.

Abraham Lincoln used Morrill Tariff revenue to fight the Civil War. The 11 Republican Presidents who followed, from 1865 to 1929, were all protectionists, and made America the greatest industrial power in history, with a standard of living never before seen. Mocking protectionism, McCain is repudiating Republican history and all its achievements up to the era of Dwight Eisenhower and Richard Nixon.

Free trade has cost America (like everywhere else) sovereignty, sunk the dollar, hollowed out American manufacturing, caused wages to stagnate, forced married mothers into the labour market in order to maintain the family income, indebted America enormously (like many others, including Britain) to foreign powers, and made her deeply and deepeningly dependent on foreign goods and on the foreign borrowings to pay for them (again, like Britain).

Oh, and it is inseparable from open borders and from the waging of wars all over the place.

Obama stands with the Teamsters and other unions on the sending of American jobs to un-unionised, child-exploiting sweatshops in Asia and Latin America. He stands with the black, Irish and Scots-Irish working classes on sending their sons off to be harvested in pointless, unwinnable wars on behalf of others in American society who do not pull their weight militarily.

And the core of his core, which he will have to keep happy in order to secure a second term, is not only the morally conservative mainstay of things like the Alliance for Marriage, but is also made up of the people most opposed to illegal and even much legal immigration, and whose views on the status of English make them the South Welsh of America.

Vote Obama.